1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a supervisory and control support equipment realizing supervision and control by collecting information concerning operations and maintenance and processing the information with respect to a desired facility.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, high-developed information processing technology and transmission technology is applied to many communication equipments.
Among such communication equipments, a transmission equipment which is installed at a geographically remote secluded location, unattended continuous running and preventive maintenance is achieved by pertinently informing connected lines and status of equipped packages to a centralized supervision and control center located at a remote place.
In a transmission equipment connected to a transmission channel of a trunk line system, it is required that the supervision and control can be continued even in the case in which serious disaster such as earthquake or conflagration occurs.
Therefore, in the procedure of maintenance and operations of these transmission equipments, updated or generated important information is downloaded pertinently to the centralized supervision and control center along with office data via a communication link, by achieving duplication, general reliability is highly maintained.
FIG. 7 is a diagram showing a configuration example of a conventional supervision and control system.
In the drawing, transmission equipments 81-1 through 81-n, a master supervisory and control support equipment 82, and a slave supervisory and control support equipment 83 are connected to a network 84. Disk array drive 85 is connected to the master supervisory and controls support equipment 82.
As shown in FIG. 8, the master supervisory and control support equipment 82 is integrated with software comprising:
a man-machine interfacing part 82i for constituting a man-machine interfacing part with operators engaged with maintenance and operations via terminal apparatus, not illustrated;
an NE-manager 82N mutually transmitting and receiving predetermined messages to and from transmission equipments 81-1 through 81-n opposed thereto via communication ports and the network 84; and
management objects 82M-1 through 82M-p for holding and updating information concerning supervision and control and performing a predetermined processing to be carried out with the information as an operand in an unit of all or any of the transmission equipments 81-1 through 81-n or subsystems, frames, shelves, modules constituting these transmission equipments 81-1 through 81-n and achieving to distribute predetermined function and load.
Furthermore, among the above-described subsystems, frames, shelves and modules, those components of processing individually performed by the management objects 82M-1 through 82M-p, are simply referred to as xe2x80x9cobjectsxe2x80x9d in the following.
In the procedure of supervision and control of the transmission equipments 81-1 through 81-n, basic procedures and operands of processings performed in cooperation with the man-machine interfacing part 82-1, the NE-manager 82N and the management objects 82M-1 through 82M-p, have no relation to do with the invention and accordingly, an explanation thereof will be omitted here.
In FIG. 8, an arrow mark of a solid line signifies that a task or a management object corresponding to a front edge of the arrow mark is invoked with information or event generated by a management object or a task corresponding to a starting point of the arrow mark as a starting factor.
An operating system installed to the master supervisory and control support equipment 82 performs storage management of a storage area of the disk array drive 85.
The disk array drive 85 is stored, according to the storage management, with supervision and control information applied to any of line supervisory and control, equipment supervisory and control, centralized supervision and control and preventive maintenance configured by both or either one of;
information previously given as office data or subscriber data; and
generated or updated information in the procedure of maintenance and operations;
with regard to an individual object at a predetermined period.
Furthermore, the disk array drive 85 parallelly holds supervisory control information to be given and written or updated by the master supervisory and control support equipment 82 to duplicated storage media as described below.
In the disk array drive 85, there is controlled a system configuration of two storage areas redundantly configured at storage media by a unit of either of a truck or a sector formed by partitioning the storage media.
In the disk array drive 85, a storage area to become an object of reading information is selected by a unit of a medium, a truck or a sector which is actively used under the above-described system configuration.
Therefore, the supervisory control information is redundantly stored to the disk array drive 85 based on the active redundancy system and is pertinently read therefrom.
Meanwhile, the slave supervisory and control support equipment 83 is located at a site remote geographically from a site where the master supervisory and control support equipment 82 is located to a degree by which influence of serious disaster, mentioned above, is avoided by a desired certainty.
Moreover, the master supervisory and control support equipment 82 downloads backup the information to be applied to backup information stored in the disk array drive 85, as mentioned above, to the slave supervisory and control support equipment 83 via the network. 84 at a predetermined frequency.
The transmission equipments 81-1 through 81-n download the updated information (hereinafter referred to as xe2x80x9cquasi-backup informationxe2x80x9d) in the process (including channel control, call processing and fluctuation in traffic) of maintenance and operations to the slave supervisory and control support equipment 83 via the network 84 by a predetermined procedure or at a predetermined frequency.
The slave supervisory and control support equipment 83 holds backup information and quasi-backup information downloaded in this way to a predetermined external storage.
Furthermore, these information is applied in the case in which supervisory control information redundantly stored to the disk array drive 85 is not applicable to continuation of recovery and operation of the system owing to failure or disaster which actually occurs.
Meanwhile, according to the above-described conventional example, the backup information on the quasibackup information are downloaded to the slave supervisory and control support equipment 83 asynchronously.
Therefore, backup information generated by combining the quasi-backup information to the backup control information in failure or disaster which occurs actually, is not necessarily equal to the latest supervisory control information stored at the disk array drive 85. (Here, the backup information above is generated, for instance, by the slave supervisory and control support equipment 83 that performs the dedicated tool(s).)
Therefore, application thereof has not been permitted in order to regularly achieve continuation or recovery of operation mentioned above, unless the backup control information is properly edited manually,
However, in generating such a backup control information, generally, many man-hours are needed because much of trials and errors are accompanied, even when the above-described tool is utilized.
Therefore, in recovering the transmission equipments 81-1 through 81-n, there is a high possibility of requiring an extremely long time.
It is an object of the invention to provide a supervisory and control support equipment achieving continuation or resume of operations with high certainty and efficiency without changing the configuration of hardware.
It is another object of the invention to save labor and achieve a reduction in running cost relevant to its maintenance and operations of a supervision and control system and enhance availability and practicability along with reliability of the supervision and control system without substantially changing the configuration of hardware and software in comparison with the conventional example.
It is another object of the invention to save supervisory control information in an external storage with high certainty and efficiency even during a period in which a storage means is not normally operated.
It is another object of the invention to improve service quality along efficiency and flexibility of work relevant to its maintenance and operations.
It is another object of the invention to achieve simplification of the structure of software.
It is another object of the invention to improve flexibility in variations of configurations of a system, which becomes an object of supervision and control.
It is another object of the invention to achieve high degree of modularization and improve reliability along with flexibility in changing the configuration of a monitoring system to which the present invention is applied.
It is another object of the invention to avoid interruption of supervision and control due to a failure and promptly achieve reconfiguration of the system with high certainty when recovered from the failure.
It is another object of the invention that a facility in which a failure occurred promptly becomes the object of supervision and control with high certainty when the facility recovers from the failure.
Further, another object of the invention is achieved by a supervisory and control support equipment in which it is possible to shorten, with high certainty, a period, during which supervision and control of an individual facility is delayed.
The above-described object is achieved by a supervisory and control support equipment characterized in performing a processing related to supervision and control on a plurality of facilities, writing information generated during the procedure of the processing and respectively corresponding to the facilities, to a secondary storage through a cache memory, and saving the information held in the cache memory in an external storage when a predetermined event is recognized during the procedure of the processing.
In the supervisory and control support equipment, the supervisory control information is saved in the external storage with high efficiency and certainty even during a period in which the secondary storage is not normally operated.
The above-described object is achieved by the supervisory and control support equipment characterized in that the predetermined event is given as a demand from the exterior.
In the supervisory and control support equipment, the supervisory control information is pertinently saved in the external storage at moments adaptable to the form of maintenance and operations regardless of the operating states of the secondary storage.
Therefore, service quality is enhanced along with efficiency and flexibility of work relevant to its maintenance and operations.
Furthermore, the above-described object is achieved by the supervisory and control support equipment characterized in that the predetermined event is given as a point in time at a predetermined frequency.
In the supervisory and control support equipment, the latest supervisory control information held in a cache memory is repeatedly saved at the predetermined frequency.
Consequently, as long as the frequency is set to a proper value with desired accuracy, the moment at which the latest supervisory control information above is saved in the external storage is firmly given without a dedicated processing added to the procedure of the processing relevant to supervision and control, and the configuration of the software can be simplified.
The above object is achieved by the supervisory and control support equipment characterized in that both or either one of the function and load of the processing relevant to the supervision and control is distributed to a plurality of management objects, the predetermined event is analyzed, and there is provided a supplemental processing section which demands a management object adaptable to the result of the analysis, of the management objects, to save information held in the cache memory in the external storage.
The supervisory and control support equipment is constructed by distributing the function and the load to modularized management objects adaptable to a configuration of a system which becomes an object of supervision and control.
Therefore, the configuration of software is standardized and flexibility in the variations of the configuration of the system which becomes the object of supervision and control is enhanced.
Moreover, the above-described object is achieved by the supervisory and control support equipment characterized in that the supplemental processing section is constructed of a module distinct from the plurality of objects.
In the supervisory and control support equipment, the supplemental processing section is constructed of a module distinct from a plural n of management objects.
In other words, these management objects does not include the processing to be performed by a supplemental processing section at all, so modularization is achieved at a high degree and reliability is improved along with flexibility in variations of the configurations of the system.
The above-described object is achieved by the supervisory and control support equipment characterized in that a secondary storage reflects information stored as a file according to the recovery of the secondary storage.
In the supervisory and control support equipment, even when failure occurs in the secondary storage, interruption to supervision and control is avoided and the recovered secondary storage is promptly included in an active facility with high certainty as long as all of the updated supervisory control information is saved in the external storage.
The above-described object is achieved by the supervisory and control support equipment characterized in that according to the restart or recovery of a facility, information corresponding to the facility, of information stored as files, is given to the storage media, communication media, or other media supplied for information interchanging with the facility.
In the supervisory and control support equipment, the information given to the above-described media includes all the supervisory control information to be updated on a specific facility after a point in time at which a failure has occurred at the specific facility.
Therefore, even when the failure occurs in any one of the plural n of facilities, the facility promptly becomes an object of supervision and control with high certainty when recovered from the failure as long as all the updated supervisory control information is saved in the external storage.
Furthermore, the above-described object is achieved by the supervisory and control support equipment characterized in that when any facility, of the plurality of facilities, is to be excluded from the configuration of the system, information to be transmitted to the facility is stored as a file in the external storage.
In the supervisory and control support equipment, the information to be transmitted to the facility based on the procedure of supervision and control is sequentially stored in the external storage of the facility excluded from the configuration of the system.
Therefore, as long as the information stored in this way is readable, the corresponding facility is firmly included in the configuration of the system by applying the information.
The above-described object is achieved by the supervisory control equipment characterized in that according to the restart or recovery of a facility, information corresponding to the facility, of information stored as files, is given to the facility.
In the supervisory and control support equipment, the facility which has recovered from a failure can smoothly transit to a normal operating state based on the information given in this way.
Therefore, it is possible to shorten, with high certainty, a period, during which the supervision and control are delayed in any one of the plural n of facilities.